Hi Ishaan,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 3: I’m actively figuring out what my interests are by trying one or more of them out in some way .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were universalism, benevolence, and self-direction.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was openness.
You said your top three talents were analytic, artistic / spatial, and musical.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you were not sure yet about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to make more friends .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Cook at least 3 healthy lunches .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Be healthier .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Low time .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I start to get hungry, then I will start cooking .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in academics .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt Anxious when receiving critical feedback, and Anxious when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being social reasons .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Health .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Parent .
In one word, you said it made you feel Pensive .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
| |
| "I think happiness is IN the pursuit" |
| "You cannot be great at anything you are not interested in." |
| "If you ask me about what the secret to happiness is, it is about alignment" |
| "Exploration is the period where you are seemingly going nowhere" |
| "The hardest thing in life is figuring out what to do" |
| "Be careful to evaluate in the aftermath of WOOP. Just be happy you did something" |
| "Praise publicly, criticize privately" |
| "Be kind to all you meet, for each carries their own burden." |
| "The next time you feel stupid, my guess is that you weren't paying attention to the thing you were supposed to" |
| "If I am not for myself then who will be for me?" |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
| |
| Albena Ruseva |
| Ishaan is such a warm humble soul. He has so much to give the world and should know that people see that in him. He was nothing but kind and I loved hearing about all the amazing things he did over the week. I really loved his gratitude letter to his mom, which revealed his depth of character, as well as how happy and fulfilled he seemed to be when he was talking about it. Ishaan was extremely considerate, and always a nice presence to be around. I found it really amusing how much he wanted one of those prizes in class (and he deserved them!).
Ishaan’s presentation was the first in our cohort and it set the bar really high. He started us off with a captivating anecdote that was so intriguing I kept thinking about it long after he presented. I also found his insights into memory retention and the use of visual cues and images to increase data retention fascinating. I appreciated how seamlessly he weaved storytelling with informative content as well as his section on advice from the person he spoke to. |
| Ishaan is such a warm humble soul. He has so much to give the world and should know that people see that in him. He was nothing but kind and I loved hearing about all the amazing things he did over the week. I really loved his gratitude letter to his mom, which revealed his depth of character, as well as how happy and fulfilled he seemed to be when he was talking about it. Ishaan was extremely considerate, and always a nice presence to be around. I found it really amusing how much he wanted one of those prizes in class (and he deserved them!).
Ishaan’s presentation was the first in our cohort and it set the bar really high. He started us off with a captivating anecdote that was so intriguing I kept thinking about it long after he presented. I also found his insights into memory retention and the use of visual cues and images to increase data retention fascinating. I appreciated how seamlessly he weaved storytelling with informative content as well as his section on advice from the person he spoke to. |
| Alivia Jiang |
| From the first day I met Ishaan, I knew I had just met someone who was extraordinarily bright. Just from introductions alone and him sharing his experiences on campus running hackathons, I have learned that (especially coming from the perspective of a student who cannot code to save her life), Ishaan is not only fascinated by that field, he is an expert in it. The thing I appreciate the most about him is how he is incredibly accomplished, now in his senior year at Penn, but never fails to be exceptionally humble and reflective. He challenges his own thought processes as well as my own, and I feel like I would not have gotten what I got out of Grit Lab without him. I am sad to know that he will be graduating and moving on from Penn this year, but am so insanely excited to see all that he will accomplish beyond university!
As someone who genuinely cannot memorize things to save her life, when Ishaan first introduced his Discovery Project of memorization, I thought that it would be something complicated that I would never be able to understand. However, I was immediately drawn in by the accessible way that he presented this project. Instead of trying to use complicated frameworks, he instead engaged the audience by asking us to envision his process of memorizing the digits of Pi alongside him. Although I didn’t end up learning any more digits of Pi per se, I was able to understand how he had gone about memorizing the large scale information that he had pursued with this project, which was highly engaging. Overall, I learned from Ishaan that a rather daunting task such as his large-scale memorization task can be doable as long as it is presented in an approachable manner. Whereas even I was initially intimidated by it, his simple tricks of “using more vowels” and “coding it as an image” made me understand more why this is such a topic of expertise and fascination for him. |
| From the first day I met Ishaan, I knew I had just met someone who was extraordinarily bright. Just from introductions alone and him sharing his experiences on campus running hackathons, I have learned that (especially coming from the perspective of a student who cannot code to save her life), Ishaan is not only fascinated by that field, he is an expert in it. The thing I appreciate the most about him is how he is incredibly accomplished, now in his senior year at Penn, but never fails to be exceptionally humble and reflective. He challenges his own thought processes as well as my own, and I feel like I would not have gotten what I got out of Grit Lab without him. I am sad to know that he will be graduating and moving on from Penn this year, but am so insanely excited to see all that he will accomplish beyond university!
As someone who genuinely cannot memorize things to save her life, when Ishaan first introduced his Discovery Project of memorization, I thought that it would be something complicated that I would never be able to understand. However, I was immediately drawn in by the accessible way that he presented this project. Instead of trying to use complicated frameworks, he instead engaged the audience by asking us to envision his process of memorizing the digits of Pi alongside him. Although I didn’t end up learning any more digits of Pi per se, I was able to understand how he had gone about memorizing the large scale information that he had pursued with this project, which was highly engaging. Overall, I learned from Ishaan that a rather daunting task such as his large-scale memorization task can be doable as long as it is presented in an approachable manner. Whereas even I was initially intimidated by it, his simple tricks of “using more vowels” and “coding it as an image” made me understand more why this is such a topic of expertise and fascination for him. |
We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.